Legends of Tomorrow EP, star preview turbulent times ahead for Sara-Ava, Nate-Hank

After four months away, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow — a.k.a. TV’s best superhero show — is finally back next Monday. Unfortunately for the Legends, though, some of their most important relationships will be tested (and possibly fracture!) in the back half of season 4.

In case you forgot: The last time we checked in with the wonderfully messy time-travelers, Constantine (Matt Ryan), Zari (Tala Ashe), and Charlie (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) had just finished fixing reality after breaking it; Mona (Ramona Young) was hit by time wave while trying to save the Kaupe from suspicious men in black; and it was revealed that Nate’s father Hank (Tom Wilson) was working with Neron.

Picking up in the aftermath of the genre-bending fall finale, the midseason premiere, titled “Lucha De Apuestas,” dives into what exactly happened to Mona, who is in trouble for letting the Kaupe escape. Their attempts at recapturing the Kaupe ultimately leads them to 1961 Mexico City.

“We’re heading into the world of Mexican wrestling, luchadores. It’s a great episode for our first one back,” executive producer and showrunner Phil Klemmer tells EW. “The story line that we really pick up is what happened to poor Mona when that time wave blasted her. She had just been clawed by a Kaupe, and then we’re trying to get back into what Hank Heywood’s interest in the bureau seems to be.”

This misadventure ends up putting a strain on several relationships that continues for the rest of the season. “We spent the first half of the season trying to bring people closer together, and the back half of the season is really about challenging the fragile alliance between Nate and his dad, and even the more sturdy alliance between the Legends and the Bureau, and to make it more personal, between Sara and Ava, the respective heads of those two groups,” says Klemmer. “It sounds depressing. We’re gonna mess things up for our guys, and we’re going to start seeing some fracture lines appear between characters that I think a lot of us have come to like together. That’s the way it’s gotta be sometimes.”

At the beginning of the season, Sara (Caity Lotz) and Ava (Jes Macallan) promised each other that they would continue moving forward; however, in the back half of the season, we’ll see them struggle with that promise.

“I think they both love each other very much, so the drama mostly comes from, you have two very powerful women who have very demanding jobs that they’re the boss of,” says Caity Lotz. “It’s very difficult to try to balance work life and regular life. Of course, too, Ava’s a clone and dealing with some issues about her past and who she is and same with Sara. They both have very colorful pasts. So, it’s mostly, they love each other and they want to make it work, but it’s not going to be easy.”

“In a lot of ways, their relationship is strong, but they’ve continued to exist primarily in their own spheres,” says Klemmer. “For Sara and Ava, they both have extraordinary responsibilities, and neither is willing to compromise. [They] have never had a period of domesticity. They’re kind of best when they’re standing in the flames and the world is coming apart around them. Sometimes paradoxically, the hardest, scariest thing to do is sit on the couch or sort through the mail and talk about who’s going to take the trash out. We thought that’s very delightful, that for Sara and Ava the most mundane challenges would actually be the most epic because they skipped to the epic stuff in the beginning of their relationship and now they’re having to do things backwards.”

With Nate and Hank, Klemmer and the writers were interested in exploring “if you have essentially good-hearted lovable goofball Nate and his rigid, scary, somewhat nefarious father Hank having this reconnection, which way is it going to go?” says Klemmer. “Which one is going to rub off on the other? Is it a chance for Hank’s redemption? Is it a chance for Nate’s fall from grace? We wanted to keep that tension alive, because again, to us, we wanted that father-son relationship to be poignant.”

Odds are fans will be surprised by how this all plays out because the writers definitely were. According to Klemmer, they went back and forth on the season’s ultimate villain. “We changed course two or three times in the back half of the season just trying to figure out who is going to be our irredeemable villain,” says Klemmer. “If you listen closely to the episodes, I think you can hear us as writers losing our resolve to find out who is truly irredeemably evil. It’s a bit of a bad guy hot potato.”

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow returns Monday, April 1 at 8 p.m. on The CW.

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